Asset

Date of ingest: 16 April 2026

Description: These are the earliest written notes for Ayn Rand’s final novel, Atlas Shrugged, which has had a significant impact on American culture and politics since its publication in 1957. The notes contain Rand’s initial thoughts about the novel’s theme, plot, and characters. A major plot element in the novel, on which these first notes focus, is that of “the creators” (“men of creative ability, in every profession”) going on strike in response to how badly the world treats them, and what happens to the world in their absence. Later, Rand stated the novel’s theme as “the role of the mind in man’s existence—and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest.” That morality was Rand’s answer to what she saw as America’s most urgent “unfinished revolution.” The Founders of the United States had implemented a revolutionary political principle: that each individual human being had a political right to exist for his own sake, under a government whose sole responsibility should be protecting individual rights. Ayn Rand saw this early commitment to freedom and individual rights (and the enormous success achieved by so many individuals because of it) slipping away from America during the twentieth century. She identified, in a later, nonfiction presentation of the ideas in Atlas Shrugged, that “The world crisis of today is a moral crisis—and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American Revolution” (For the New Intellectual).